A hyphen can make a huge difference in a word and give it a new semantic and the reader a new insight.
I’ve been rather taken recently by Lee Carroll’s book, The End Times, where writes about “voiding karma”. The simple message is one that is well known. When you follow your life’s path, then you move on and upwards gracefully and easily. We all though are brilliant at self sabotage.
The simple addition of a hyphen and a letter makes it easy to understand the flip side.
If you a-void karma, then you get stuck in a loop and the same lesson comes around to hit you again and again. Perhaps it manifests as the same type of partner or the same dead end job. Once it’s recognised – or better expressed as re-cognised, as you have been there be-fore – you can move on and embrace the next challenge and new learnings.
So armed with this gem, you have the whole lexicon and richness of the English language to play with. The potential for enlightenment is immense.
Now I run workshops on creative writing where I teach authors how to tap into inspiration. Imagine my surprise when the addition of this simple hyphen led to a huge insight.
The etymology of in-spiration decomposes into the word into “in” and exposes the Latin root of “spirare” which means “to breathe”.
Now I was aware we speak on the out breath. Could it be that ideas, and divine guidance, come to us on the in breath?
Some experimentation with my own meditation, then with individual clients and latterly in group classes seemed to confirm this was true. I used a modified Taoist Drop meditation I learned from the Barefoot Doctor and amazing results ensued.
I was on a roll. This insight then morphed and expanded into inner-sight. My intuition told me that this was all really inner-tuition. Where would all this linguistic in-vention lead? There you go again with the breathing!
I have always thought it amazing what people like Leonardo achieved in a single life time. He was a polymath – an artist, sculptor and inventor. Not only did he think up the helicoptor but he had the pre-science to add the parachute too in case it failed. Now some Kryon channellings imply that our in-carnations do not necessarily follow chrono-logically. Perhaps this re-naissance man reborn in the past from a future life or another planet?
Yes, just re-read the above para-graph again. The semantic layering is deep, wide and so much fun.
So it tran-spires that the English language has become entrenched in concantenation. I suppose this occurs in all languages, naturally, from years of usage and abusage.
Then a horrible thought occurred to me. If language slides into the modern day parlance of mobile phone text-speak then the origins become lost forever – hardly LOL 4 U & I.
I was in-spired to craft some verse in order to re-verse this trend.
The addition of a hypen
A gift of inner-sight
We are what we speak
Inner-tuitive light
Expand The Word
Banish concantenation
Add a simple dash
For joyous e-lucidation
So a call to all
Authors, poets and scribes
Add verve and dashes to your work
Keep true meanings alive
Now such lyrical musings take your mind down new paths and it occurred to me while penning this that this thought piece would not be complete if it didn’t include re-search on the word hyphen itself.
Imagine my surprise when I found this online …
c.1620, from L.L. hyphen, from Gk. hyphen “mark joining two syllables or words,” probably indicating how they were to be sung, “together, in one”
So it appears that first there was The Word. Then we combined them and then we sang and re-played them back to the Heavens. What an Ode to Joy.
P.S. If you think are A-voiding Karma, you may like to do the exercise and visualisation in this blog on How To Void Karma
Interesting, I sometimes hyphenate two separate words, which could be logically grouped together, like computer-programming, but I have never experimented with hyphening the actual syllables of a word.
While I think this is intriguing and could be a great poetic device, I can also see how its widespread adoption could potentially have some negative effects on the English language.